The Collected Short Fiction, page 8
“These aren’t the normal hazards.”
“But if it serves your purpose to link up with the other ship, then how can I or anyone else persuade you not to?”
“Not by discussion, of that I’m sure,” she said. “But maybe Ry your presence. I do have responsibilities toward the people who work for me.” She was reminded of what Kondrashef had said to her. Even if they could link up with the Fairchild ship, what guarantee did she have that the Heuritex’s predictions were completely accurate? They didn’t have complete figures on what Kamon’s ship was capable of. Already they’d been surprised several times. And her first lieutenant, Nilsbaum, had worked the problem out on an alternate computer, a human-manufacture Datapak. It had given them eighty percent chances of hitting a singularity if they linked and performed a proto-geometry jump. The heuritex had disagreed. But still, the dichotomy existed.
“I can’t blast the bastard,” Anna said, “because every pot-shot I take is registered by the tattle machines I had to hook up to pass USC regulations. No way to tamper with them—they retreat into stasis whenever they’re not registering. No, a link-up is the only way.”
She looked sharply at the kanaka. He looked back at her, his face blank and expectant. “Go take a shower,” she said. Then, softer, “Please. You helped me very much.” She turned over and listened to the sounds of the door closing and water running.
She was staring at the drifting colors on the nacreous ceiling when the intership chimed. She reached over to depress the switch and listened half-drowsily. The voice of the Heuritex brought her fully awake.
“Madame, we’ve contacted Fairchild’s ships. First Lieutenant Nilsbaum requests your presence on the bridge.”
“I’ll be there. Any message from Disjohn?”
“He refuses to allow any link-up. He says he has two reasons—first, that he will not jeapordize your life; and second, that his computers predict failure if such a plan is carried out. I don’t understand these machines of human construction.”
“Did he say anything else?”
“He just advised you to leave this sector.”
She sat up in bed and put her chin in her hands. The shower was still running. “Another question,” she said.
“Yes, madame.”
“What happens to us if we hit a black hole? I’ve forgotten most of my physics . . .”
“Depending on the angle we hit at, we have several varieties of doom. If we go straight in, perpendicular to a tangent, we pass through two or more event horizons, depending on the theoretical geometry you subscribe to—”
“What are event horizons?”
“Simply the horizons beyond which no further events can be seen. The gravitational field at that point has accelerated any particle approaching it close to the speed of light. From an outside point of view, the particle’s time has slowed to almost nothing, no motion at all, so it will take an infinite time to hit the singularity below the event horizon. But from our point of view—if we are the hypothetical particle—we will hit it. Much that it will matter to us, though. Long before we pass through the innermost event horizon tidal forces will exert strains on us sufficient to strip us down to subatomic particles.”
“Not too pleasant.”
“No, but there are other options. At a lesser angle, we might pass through an outer event horizon at a speed sufficient to propel us into another geometry, and out again someplace else—a different place and time in our own universe, perhaps, or in another full-continuum universe. We might survive that, if certain theoretical conditions prove true—though it would be a rough trip and the ship might not emerge in one solid piece.”
“How can there be more than one event horizon?”
“Because black holes rotate. May I draw you a comparison of two Kruskal-Szekeres diagrams?”
“By all means,” Ann said, activating the display screen on the intership.
But the mosaic-like charts did little to help her comprehension.
XIV
“OUT OF THE HALF-PHASE,” Kamon said to himself. “Now!”
The image reappeared. He had misjudged the geodesic slightly. The ship was a light-hour farther away than he had predicted, which meant the ship’s appearance was an hour off from actual emergence. He felt a brief confusion. Fairchild had pulled it out of half-phase an hour early, then, since the appearance had happened according to Kamon’s schedule. But the ruse—if ruse it was—had gained them a very small advantage. He immediately switched to sub-space sensors.
Fairchild’s ship was over four light-hours away. More disturbing, it was heading toward a nebulosity which charts said contained three collapsars, two of them black holes. Kamon deftly probed the nebula with his proto-geometry sensors. None of these singularities had ever been used for pilgrimages, thus they did not radiate Thrina songs. The area had not been thoroughly charted except on visual and radio levels from thousands of light-years away, where the patterns of the roiling gas-clouds had given away the presence of hidden collapsars. His new scanning revealed another member of the family, deadly elusive and sacred. It was a naked singularity. The very presence of humans in such a region was sacrilege—but if they were choosing suicide over destruction at his hands, the danger was unthinkable. If they should plunge into any of the singularities . . .
A shudder racked his entire body. He had heard of humans going insane under stress, but if they fell into a singularity here, the Venging was a failure and the Rift would never be clean again.
He forced himself to be calm. They wouldn’t know how to prepare themselves for the Fall. They knew nothing about the mental ritual involved. It would be, in effect, nothing more than a suicide. Or it would be something worse, for them.
But his basic instinct said destroy them before they ever reached the cloud. For the first time he began to feel real anxiety that he might fail.
He did so want to live forever!
“It can’t be done!” Lady Fairchild shouted. “Disjohn, I’m not ignorant! I know what those things are. Graetikin has to be insane to think we can survive that!”
“I’ve heard him explain it. The computers back him up.”
“Yes, on his assumptions!”
“He’s on to something new. He knows what he’s talking about—and he’s right. We don’t have any other choice. The Aighor has every advantage over us, including religious zeal—as you pointed out. We’ve tested event-models on the computers again and again. We have one chance in a thousand of coming out alive. With Graetikin’s plan, our chances are at least ten times greater.”
“We’re going to die, is what you’re saying, either way.”
“Probably. But there’s something grander about this way of going. It robs Kamon of his goal. We hold the upper hand now.”
“You know what will happen if we suicide in one of the singularities?” Edith asked.
“We don’t plan on suiciding.”
“Just going down one, we make this entire region useless to them for their pilgrimages. Mixing souls is anathema to them, like mixing meat and milk to an Orthodox Jew.”
“There was a hygienic reason not to mix meat and milk. It spoils faster.”
“Are we so bloody materialistic that we can’t see a reason for this kind of tabu?”
Fairchild swung his hands out and turned away from her, talking loudly to the wall. “Damn it, Edith, we have to use Occam’s razor! We can’t multiply our hypotheses until we avoid stepping on cracks for fear of killing our mothers. We’re rational beings! Kamon has that advantage over us—he is not acting rationally. He’s on a venging, just like a Goddam berserker, and he’s got a faster, better armed ship. We’re doomed! What should we do, bare our breast to him and shout ‘mea culpa’ ?” Edith shook her head. “I don’t know . . . I feel so lost.”
Fairchild shivered. “You’re not alone. Any being would.”
“Except Aighors,” Edith reminded him. “And they’ve always been prepared for it.”
XVI
“HE WON’T LET US dock with him, he’s turning toward the singularities—there’s nothing more I can do,” Anna said. “He’s choosing suicide rather than give Kamon the pleasure of executing him. Or is he up to something?”
“I can offer no explanation, madame. Either they have gone insane or they have data unavailable to me.”
She sighed and leaned back in her chair. “Can they receive any messages now?”
“They are in the cloud. There’s too much interference.”
“Veer off. Circle to the opposite side of the nebula and we’ll see if anything emerges at that end. I’ve met Fairchild’s captain—he may have more up his sleeve than we can know from this perspective.” Dumfounded, Anna watched the final act on her sensors and tapped her fingers on the Heuritex.
XVII
PROBABILITY FELL apart at the ergosphere interface of a singularity. Whether the same conditions applied to a naked singularity or not, he didn’t know—he guessed they would. But they wouldn’t have to face the danger of the tidal forces—there would be no event horizons, no overt indication of in-rushing space-time. The singularity ahead had collapsed from a star oblated by the presence of other stars, and the result was a hole in space-time stretched out into a line. If conditions still applied here, he’d have to figure their chances of survival on a near-poetic hunch.
It was clear to Graetikin now. Inter-universe connections of necessity were devoid of probabilities. They were truce zones between regions of differing qualities, differing constants. Hence, somewhere above the singularity, re-shaping of infalling material had to take place.
Perhaps the Aighors weren’t far wrong after all.
He worked all his findings into a single tight-packed signal on several media and broadcast it to space in general. When he was finished he turned to Disjohn and Edith and said, “Feels good to toss out a bottle, anyway. If someone picks it up, well and good. If not, we’ve lost a few megawatts. But we’ll replace that and more in the plunge. Too bad we won’t be able to use it.”
“What does that mean?” Edith asked in a small voice.
“If we survive, we’ll absorb the gain evenly and there will be no differences in potential to draw power from. And if we don’t, then it won’t matter.”
The computer spoke up in disagreement. “It will be gained as overall temperature increase and resistance to acceleration,” it said. “Not as anything involving potential.”
“I was thinking metaphorically,” Graetikin demurred. “But it’s right, of course.”
XVIII
KAMON COULD EITHER back off, let them escape and hope for an encounter later, or he could pursue to the very end. But he was becoming fatalistic. It seemed the Fairchild ship was behaving not with human insanity, but with divine irrationality—a shield to his Venging. That could imply they were operating in the Grace of the Thrina, not against it. He wished he could consult the Council with his new intuition, but there was no time. Whether he was correct or not, it made him reluctant to interfere. That small reluctance made him hesitate.
“No!” he shouted, pounding his thorax in disgust. “They are only insane! There is no Grace upon them!”
But it was too late. He had followed the Fairchild ship into the nebulosity on a matching course. They could only construe that as an intention to continue the chase. Since they were insane, they would destroy themselves.
In his self-rage, he considered destroying the Nestor ship for personal satisfaction. But he had other things to do. He had to prepare himself mentally for the Fall. He told the others to begin their rituals. They would follow all the way.”
XIX
“COURSE PLOTTED,” the computer told Graetikin. “There will be a proper configuration at these points of the chart. We can meet the singularity’s effect-field here, or here—that is, at these points in our future-line. If we fail within any width of time measurable in quantum jump intervals, we will come in at a closer angle and the warp-wave of our approach will create a temporary event horizon which will destroy us. These are our options.”
“Initiate the action and test it on a closed loop. Then choose the best approach and put us there. Kamon hasn’t left our tail?”
“No, he still follows. And still jams.”
“Then my message didn’t get through.” Somehow that didn’t bother him much.
Fairchild gave the final order. Edith watched from his side with a small, knowing smile playing around her lips. She was remembering her childhood. She’d married Disjohn, in fact, because he reminded her of the strength of her father. She needed that strength now.
The ship’s corridors echoed with metal groans as the impact of the nebula’s clouds smashed her.
The tiny neutron star was pulsating regularly. It was surrounded by its own halo of accelerated particles, a natural generator of radio energy. The two normal singularities orbited each other, half a light-hour apart. The violet influx of gases outlined them clearly. Like two whirlpools whose surfaces have been smeared with oil, they glowed in disparate, shimmering mazes of light. Starlight ran in rings around them. Ghost images of each other flickered in the rings, and the ghosts carried rings of stars, and images of other ghosts.
Here time and space rushed into multi-dimensional holes so rapidly that an object had to move at light speed to stay in one place. It was a Red Queen’s race of cosmic—and cosmological—proportions.
In drawing diagrams of what happens in the singularity below the event horizons, space and time axes cross and replace each other. The word “singularity” itself is a phrase of no more significance than “boojum.” It implies points in any mathematical manifold where results start coming out in impossible terms, zeroes or infinities or imaginary numbers. Thus, Graetikin knew more than any of the others, they were soon to step off the pages of one book which had told their lives until now, leave that book behind and everything associated with it, and risk a plunge into null.
God’s universe was being twisted into grotesque failures and inconceivable alterations.
The naked singularity invisibly approached.
XX
KAMON’S THOUGHTS grew fuzzy and uncoordinated. He spasmed with rage as one portion of his mind came unbalanced in the ritual, lashed out with his tail at the bulkhead before him, denting the inch-thick metal. Then he regained balance.
The holiday display of the black holes dominated everything.
He was ready. A tiny reserve part of him prepared his weapons for the last-ditch effort, then vanished into the calm pool of his being.
XXI
DISJOHN FAIRCHILD felt a giddiness he’d never known before. It was analogous to being spun on a carnival toy, but every part of him felt it differently.
“I’m expanding,” Lady Fairchild said. “I’m getting bigger. Alice down the rabbit hole—”
Still the ship fell. And fell.
Edith gasped. The bridge darkened for the blink of an eye, then was suddenly aglow with scattered bits of ghost lightning. She held her hands in front of her eyes and saw a blue halo around them like Cherenkov radiation. Expansion. Alteration. The desk in front of her, and her arms on the desk, broke into color-separated images and developed intricate networks of filigree, became crystalline, net-like, tingled and shimmered and pulsed, then repeated in reverse and became solid again. Everything smelled of dust and age, musty like vast libraries.
Both ships ended their existence in status geometry, at the same moment, Kamon following at a different angle, but hitting the affect-field simultaneously with the Fairchild ship. As he had known it would, the Aighor’s warp-wave created a temporary event horizon and he was divested of his material form.
The Fairchild ship survived its fall. Graetikin’s equations, thus far, were wholly accurate.
None of them could conceive of what happened in the interface. It was not chaos—it was instead a sea of quiet, an end to action. The destruction and rearrangement of rules and constants led to a lassitude of space-time, an endless sargasso of thought and event, mired and tangled and grey.
Then each experienced that peculiar quality of their world-line which made them unique. Fairchild, stable and strong, did not see much to surprise him. Graetikin marvelled in a welter of mathematical insight. Edith, still wrapped in childhood, had a nightmare and woke far in her own past, a child screaming for her father.
Again the darkness. The ouroboros of the hole spat them out. The computers triggered a lengthy jump, as best as they were able, for the actions of their smallest circuits were still not statistically reliable. This was the chance Graetikin knew they all had to take.
They lived. The ship rattled and shivered like a dog throwing off water from a swim, while the howl of metal made Fairchild’s scalp prickle and his arm-hair stand on end. Suddenly the bridge cabin was swept as by a rush of wind and it was over. Edith Fairchild wept quietly and Disjohn, beside her, trembled.
Graetikin bounced his fingers clumsily over the screen controls, then corrected and gave them a view of what lay outside.
“I don’t see anything,” Fairchild said.
“I’m astonished we even made it,” Graetikin whispered. Disjohn gave him a strange look. With adjustment, the screen still showed darkness.
“Give me a scab and chart all radiating sources,” the captain ordered the computer.
“Standard H-R distribution shows nothing. There is only an average temperature,” it said.
“What’s the temperature?”
“Two point seven one degrees Kelvin.”
Graetikin slammed his scriber onto the panel. “Any white hole activity? Any signs of the singularity we just came though?”
